Kay's History II: It is Jane Pittman in Roots I was seeing…
…I said the woman here in Chapel Hill who suffered through that could have the story. I must have been down under her. She may be mixed up with my mother and the Blake side of the family. I was in Pitt County when it happened. I had been in Massachusetts two year before that where I have since located the Perly Street. This means this event likely happened during the anti-slavery movement or during the period when race relations were not good in Massachusetts.
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A psychological cocktail for sleeplessness…
One evening while viewing the National Geographic video on Sleep Walking, I was struck by the gentleman’s case in which he was charged with the brutal murder of his wife. My first impression was that his neighbor was involved and might have unknowingly affected the man’s behavior. I had been reading and learning about projection and projective identification during that time. As the story unfolded I learned he had difficulties on his job and may have experienced primitive negative thoughts about his boss he could easily have acted out on his wife in a state of sleepwalking. Maybe he was simply having an affair and wanted to get out of his marriage, but why not get a divorce? Why not just leave? Divorcing or leaving are rational ways of dealing with a problem including leaving his job. Fixing a pool pump in the middle of the night is irrational but on a Saturday afternoon would be quite rational. Some instruction he must have received in his youth prevented him from walking away from his problems or dealing with them in a rational manner. On thinking of this matter in the context of my own life, I recently discovered I might be connected to a woman who is from Chapel Hill where I have now relocated.
In 1977, after an evening out at a night club, I had a little more to drink than usual and fell asleep on the sofa. I was a bed wetter in my childhood and was admonished for it, so I developed repressed memories I expressed as anxiety about falling asleep, the fear of becoming too relaxed to keep from wetting the bed. As a result, one night after drinking too much, I must have had to go to the bathroom and took a white ceramic ashtray off the coffee table, placed it on the floor and urinated in it. My roommate awoke early the next morning and found the ashtray in the floor. When I woke up she pointed it out to me. I had no recollection of having done the deed but emptied it anyway. I pondered the matter for several weeks unable to recall what I did. I was employed at Kmart at the time. I guess I did it in this manner because during the late 60’s we had to use porcelain pots to go to the bathroom as we lived in a house with no bathroom for several months. This resolved the mechanics of my actions but not the why of the event. I recently learned my current neighbor, I knew nothing of at the time, during a time of racial unrest had been stopped from using the public restroom in a local store in Chapel Hill and was asked to leave. She left the store, got drunk, returned and proceeded to urinate in front of the store. This is as she recently related her experience to me. She was subsequently arrested by the police (William Blake, of Orange County, NC, possibly related to my grandmother Eunice Blake) and jailed for one night. I had been jailed overnight for public intoxication in 1977 as well. I left a bar after an argument and attempted to walk home which was 10 miles away, the Deputy Sheriff stopped me and I told him I was ok, then the Sheriff arrived and arrested me. What she told me then alerted me the drama in which we both were involved in 1977. I had been completely unconscious of the events before they occurred in my waking life which led to my behavior that night. I had no knowledge of Ms. Perly at anytime. I fully believed I was acting of my own free will, except for that night due to intoxication. I figured out before meeting Ms. Perly, I acted out whenever I drank alcohol, likely a psychological thing as I was given paregoric in my youth, so I was what one might say, preprogrammed to act out (other details in my childhood contributed to this behavior). And since this discovery I have located Perly Street, in a small town in Massachusetts with the same last name as my neighbor. I was in Medford, Massachusetts briefly in 1975 after being discharged from the US Army and so the story likely goes on further into history, probably pre-Civil War.
Prior to this incident, I was also suffering from severe sleep deprivation and had been without sleep many months before joining the US Army. It grew into a serious problem since seeing The Exorcist, in 1974 which is what drove me to join. For 6 months I had less than 4 hours of sleep a night. The less sleep I got the more angry I did become over not being allowed to sleep for one reason or another. I felt I had no control over my inability to get adequate sleep and put myself in many risky situations, often unable to resist them.
Before finding out about Ms. Perly I discovered a Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green, a dramatization of a murder involving members of a Mesmer Club where hypnosis was demonstrated to an audience. Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick Dr. Watson denied being able to be hypnotized but it was dramatized he could be, in the film, performing various acts as instructed by the hypnotist. After viewing this film I was certain it was possible to be hypnotized by the film and I wondered if I had been the victim of my mother having viewed it. After reflecting on my behavior since 1977, I recollected, upon returning to Tideland Mental Health in 1987 where I had been treated 10 years earlier in 1972-73, I started using self-hypnosis tapes and other types of self hypnosis tapes as a means of altering my behavior. Either me or my mother possibly had internalized the characters in the Woman in Green and I eventually succumbed to hypnotizing myself. I did see Stepford Wives. I think it likely caused me to separate my childhood and other events from the film and I began to act out the film. Prior to this film I located another noir film, the title I cannot recall (I know I was instructed to forget it) dealing with a similar group of people in which a woman was being forced to take her own life by poisoning herself (I was not instructed to forget that part of the film). I feel this film also affected my life as I have subjected myself to the use of various dangerous drugs and the excess consumption of alcohol, and often injuring myself physically and otherwise. I do not deny my personal familial experiences have had a part in that behavior. I wonder if it caused my mother’s overdose of aspirin in the early 60’s.
I concluded the film The Woman in Green, did have an affect on both of us because I purchased a green coat from Walmart (still have the receipt) around 2003, several years prior to discovering this film and green isn’t even my favorite color. I later went back and purchased the same coat in black and gave the green one to my sister, who didn’t need a coat but took it anyway. I then went to a different store and purchased a tan coat most resembling Holmes’ and one I owned in my youth, when I pretended to be a detective. Was this the real reason I was in a state of hypnotic sleep, that night, but wide awake physically at other times, possibly acting out the thoughts of the person I was and might still be connected to in Massachusetts and/or in Chapel Hill, NC, I visited in 1972, meaning these thoughts were still quite active in the mind.
I wrote another article posted here about those experiences in more detail.
